Chinese multinational technology company that specializes in Internet-related services, products, and artificial intelligence Baidu, has officially launched its much anticipated AI-powered chatbot known as “Ernie bot”, to enhance user experience.
According to the company, the chatbot is capable of comprehending human intentions and can deliver responses very close to human level.
At the launch, Baidu showcased five major capabilities of Ernie Bot, which are, Literary Writing, Business Copywriting, Algebra, Chinese culture, and multi-modal content generation. The company CEO Robin Li however disclosed that only the first three capabilities will be available.
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As regards the recent unveiling of the chatbot, he said, “For sure we cannot say that it’s perfect, so why are we unveiling it today? Because the market demands it. Today’s announcement is a natural continuation of the hard work we have put in over the past many years”. He added that Baidu has seen expectations from the market that Baidu’s product could compete with OpenAi chatbot ChatGPT.
On Thursday, Ernie Bot will be open to an initial group of users with invitation codes, and companies can apply to embed the bot into their products via Baidu’s cloud platform. The CEO revealed that 650 companies have signed up to use Ernie Bot, which can be implemented in a variety of applications such as searches, AI cloud, autonomous driving and in smart devices.
The popularity of OpenAi chatbot ChatGPT, which is currently the rave of the moment, has no doubt triggered a frenzied rush among tech companies which has seen them integrate similar chatbots into their products to enhance user’s experience.
Baidu did not hesitate to jump to the forefront of the race after it disclosed last month that it was completing a chatbot using its AI-driven deep learning model, Ernie bot which means “Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration”.
According to the tech giant CEO Robin Li, he disclosed that Baidu has for over a decade persisted in investing in Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Ernie Bot is the result of many years of hard work after the first version was developed in 2019.
The chatbot has been described to be very suitable for Chinese users owing to the fact that it understands Chinese culture better than Western models. This implies that the chatbot is likely to enjoy a significant market advantage on its home turf over other similar products. Although, Ernie bot will also be trained on other languages in the future.
Baidu plans to use Ernie bot to transform its search engine, to give users an interesting experience, which will see the platform become the most used and dominant platform in China and across the globe.
The chatbot reportedly has 550 billion facts in its knowledge graph, but they’re mostly focused on the Chinese market. So while it will be able to list Chinese idioms for users, it may not be able to answer as many questions for certain subjects outside the region.